In Spite of Everything by Susan Gregory Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

me were concerned, Dad was still noodler-in-chief. Whenever my frenzied, stressed mother was screaming at me after dinner, Dad would simply instruct me to get into the car: “Sit tight, Suze.” I’ll never know what he said to her, but he would burst out of the house, slam the car door, and head for the Berkeley Hills. We’d get out at the summit and observe constellations. “Look at that, old pal,” he said, pointing a thick index finger upward. “That star there, at the tip of Orion, is a
whole other galaxy
.”

    I t was only within the past several years, after a lot of researching and reporting I did for professional journalistic purposes (and therapy for my addled psyche) that I had one of those revelations that instantly illuminate all the murky primal feelings. It emerged from reading I did—with my first baby snuggled next to me on the messy bed—about studies on infant attachment. It’s old news to anyone who has read anything at all about children’s development in the past twenty years or so, but to me, it was flat-out jaw-dropping material. Babies are actually born
needing
to bond to someone—who knew? Renowned pediatrician Penelope Leach cites studies that show that in order to thrive, babies need to attach to a primary caregiver within the first six months of life. Without healthy attachment to such a person, a baby can develop what is called “reactive attachment disorder,” a mental health condition most often seen in cases in which babies or very young children have passed through a succession of different foster care situations, lived in orphanages, or endured prolonged hospitalization; have experienced the sudden death of a parent, or divorce; or have had multiple caregivers, parents or regular caregivers with mental illness or drug and alcohol problems, or mothers with postpartum depression. According to the Mayo Clinic, children with this disorder exhibit one of two types of behavior: “inhibited” (“shunning relationships to virtually everyone”) and “disinhibited” (attempting to “form inappropriate and shallow attachments to virtually everyone, including strangers”). According to Mayo, such children “can’t give or receive affection.”
    The good news is that, so far as a baby is concerned, it doesn’t particularly matter if the candidate for attachment is an aunt, an older brother, a grandparent, or a nurse at an orphanage. The only thing that matters is that the person lovingly and consistently attends to the baby’s needs: reading the baby’s cues, responding to them, and, most important, perhaps, taking genuine delight in the tiny creature. In return, that person becomes, to the baby, “mother.”
    As my life has lurched forward, my appreciation of this concept has been as helpful as it has been poignant. It illuminates a previouslyinvisible framework for so many of my decisions and neuroses. It helps to explain why I married the man I married; a big part of why I never, ever would have imagined in a billion years that I would get divorced. I think it also in some way explains why I, like a great many of my Generation X compadres, practiced—and still do—a modified form of “attachment parenting.” And it may also explain why my marriage fell apart a little more than a year after my father died. Because here’s the thing: Until I was ten, my dad
was
my mother.
    B ut when I was eleven, everything changed. After living in Stanford for a year, we moved to the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia, a blue-blooded territory comprising old estates, debutantes, elite prep schools, and country clubs that excluded minority members. My father had been offered a job with a fast-growing financial services company, and to keep the family together, my mother agreed to the move, giving up her position at Stanford. She hated it. We hated it. The weather was awful, the neighbors were austere and remote—so were the kids, none of whom seemed to ride bikes after school but who were